Quotes on Could

Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that in some senses could be thought of as traditionally American: The idea that everybody is equal; the idea that the rights of women and men should be the same.

I could sit at home, watch TV, and go for the odd run. But to be the best, you have to make this sacrifice, keep going away and doing blocks of training in the mountains.

It was clear to me that if I could get through Princeton at the top of my class, I could do anything in the world.

Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.

Many of us have spent a lifetime trying to be what we're not, feeling lousy about ourselves when we fail and sometimes even when we succeed. We hide our differences when, by accepting and celebrating them, we could collaborate to make every effort more exciting, productive, enjoyable, and powerful. Personally, I think we should start right now.

I have known healthy, wealthy people who were depressed, and people with critical illnesses who could honestly attest to joy.

I got tired of seeing people rush through the national anthem so they could have their popcorn and get to the game. Nobody ever sang the anthem with soul. It was always done clinically and they always stuck to the original. I put feeling into it. I sang it in a soulful manner.

I have always felt my role was to do anything I could to enable the powerless to speak. I want America to hear these voices because they are beautiful voices.

When I came out to my mother in 1990, her first words of advice were to not tell anyone. She said being gay could hurt my nascent career. The reaction was as painful as it was understandable: Back then, the world was a very different place for a 20-something LGBTQ American.

I wasn't afraid of anything until I had a kid. Then I was terrified because immediately I could imagine a hundred ways in which I could not protect him.

Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.

There is one particular argument that I call our 'ancient war.' If it could be summed up in one phrase, it would be, 'You don't get it. You don't understand what it's like to be me living with you.' There is such truth in that statement. None of us can really appreciate what it is like to be the other person, what that point of view feels like.

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.

Collective European Union action could mean no hiding places for evaders, no safe haven for tax avoiders, and no treasure islands for money launderers.

I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.

If I'd been living in Berlin in 1933-34, could I possibly have foreseen the Holocaust and all the corollary horrors of World War II? And if I had, would I have done anything about it? I also started to wonder: how does a culture slip its moorings?

We could definitely make a flying car - but that's not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that's super safe and quiet? Because if it's a howler, you're going to make people very unhappy.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

If I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home.

Clearly if a hypnotist could make someone to steal £100k just by telling them to, the world would be a different place, and I suspect that hypnotists wouldn't bother doing shows in pubs or dodgy Spanish holiday resorts.